IBM — the company of nerds who got rich long before Microsoft — scheduled the beginning of this week to completely demoralize the human race.
Monday Tuesday and Wednesday IBM’s newest supercomputer Watson will square off against the two winningest players in “Jeopardy!” history: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In practice rounds Watson has already won.
Jennings won $2.5 million on Merv Griffin’s classic Q&A show back in 2005 whereas Rutter has secured a cool $3.3 million from years of highly successful tournament play on the show. “Wired” reports the prize money for this competition is $1 million for first place then $300000 for second and $200000 for third. The two human contestants will give half their winnings to charities while IBM’s Watson taking the selfless I’m-not-a-human-and-don’t-have-an-ego high road will give all its winnings away.
“Wired” goes on to report the specs of this life-threateningly clever machine. “The system is powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running Linux and uses 15 terabytes of RAM2880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops. That’s 80 trillion operations per second.” Don’t you miss the good old days when it was just enough for computers to generate difficult ways for Mario to get to the castle and find Peach wasn’t there?
But the real key to the supercomputer’s success will be its timing on the buzzer. 13-time “Jeopardy!” champ Bob Harris wrote on tech blog boingboing.net that timing the buzz-in is the hardest part of answering successfully. Harris contends that at the top level contestants can figure out the answer to most any question but they must respond to the arbitrary timing of the producers activating the buzzerboxes.
Pepperdine’s own Dr. Bryan Givens teaches a wealth of classes in the History Department and squared off against Ken Jennings during that contestant’s historic 74-game winning streak. He too contends timing was the secret to Jennings’s success. Givens after showing students a tape of his “Jeopardy!” appearance explained jokingly how Jennings had such impeccable timing: “He’s a robot.” Bad news for Ken he’ll soon be playing an actual robot.
“2001: A Space Odyssey” introduced to the American public the concept of an evil supercomputer killing people and movies like “I Robot” and “The Matrix” have perpetuated this idea. The idea may seem far-fetched but IBM has already produced a supercomputer that like Kubrick’s HAL 9000 can defeat the world’s best chess player. (Incidentally HAL was so named because IBM helped fund the computers used in “2001 and the letters in HAL’s name are just one off from the letters in IBM. It’s just a matter of time before an IBM computer starts killing off our astronauts.)
The supercomputer is named not for Sherlock’s cohort but IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. I’m sure he would be proud to see his electronic progeny, once designed to help humans, shaming them at all their favorite activities. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson would probably love to know that the country he helped found in opposition to colonial rule currently has military personnel deployed in over 150 countries. There’s nothing sick and twisted about either of these things.
It’s as if IBM is calling all of humanity on to a medieval battle field against its artificial intelligences, beckoning us to produce a champion that can best their super, mechanical brains. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll pick the field of battle where I still have the high ground: composition. Watson may be able to answer Jeopardy!” questions like a machine but it can’t for all its 15 TB of RAM write a single intelligible question… yet. But hey I’ll gloat while I can; so here goes.
Answer: Monday Feb. 14 through Wednesday Feb. 16 at 7 p.m.
Question: What are the times I’ll be tuning into KABC while stuffing my face full of kettle corn to stifle my sobs about the inferiority of human intelligence?